

The Universe and the Devi: A translation of the unabridged Brahmanda Purana, by Bibek Debroy
At under 200 pages, Anand Ranganathan’s fiction thriller-mystery novel is an ideal read on a Delhi-Mumbai or Bangalore-Delhi plane ride. The book starts off in India’s business capital, Mumbai, where, at a lavish party at a luxury hotel, business tycoon Mihir Kothari takes a spoonful of Michelin star chef Rajiv Mehra’s soufflé and drops dead. The police find Rajiv in his hotel room’s bathroom, barely alive after what looks like an attempted suicide. CCTV footage shows him adding what is later confirmed to be cyanide from a vial to the soufflé marked for Mihir Kothari. An open-and-shut case, with a speedy trial and a death sentence guaranteed. Except he is not guilty. He cannot be guilty. Could he? Is he?
(Amazon)
HBR’s 10 Must Reads - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review – 2021 is a good collection of short articles covering diverse topics. Of all, however, The Hard Truth about Innovative Cultures, by Gary P. Pisano, is the most important, and also the best written, piece.
It may seem harsh to use the saying – ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’, but success begets imitators. Decades ago, there was the ‘HP Way’, then came Google’s ‘20% Project’ and Amazon’s ‘extreme tolerance for failure’. If HP was the original garage startup that became one of the most successful companies of Silicon Valley (before suffering the inevitable decline, terminal in many cases, that every company goes through; Jim Collins' 2009 book, How the Mighty Fall, is a good read on the subject), Google and Amazon have grown to become trillion-dollar industry leaders. It is unsurprising that leaders at companies look to these successful companies for best practices to emulate. However, a superficial adoption of these practices without an understanding of what makes them successful in the first place is a recipe for failure. The article brings out the truths about five of the best practices of these innovative corporate cultures.